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I Want to Fix Goodreads

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Re: I Want to Fix Goodreads

#91

Post by darkerside »

anonreader123 wrote: post #30
darkerside wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are the most important changes that your team is prioritizing? What are your biggest challenges with making them?

I want to be specific but I would get fired if they saw. but we read EVERY post about us. we are being ambitious and big changes are coming. biggest challenge is there is too much to do and we have so few staff.

This is so vague that if you're not faking it, you might as well be. Sorry, but don't bother posting, even under a throwaway, if you're not going to engage.

Re: I Want to Fix Goodreads

#92

Post by sillysaurusx »

rexpop wrote: post #55
anonreader123 wrote: post #18

I am a Goodreads employee. this is a burner account. i could be fired for posting. we love Goodreads and we know it is bad today. we are working to fix it. there are very few of us. we are trying. we are making big changes soon.

> i could be fired for posting. Yikes, that's rather dramatic! Especially since all you've said is "we're working to fix it. changes soon." That's a pretty harmless statement, I would think. What gives you the idea that such statements put your employment at risk?

I downvoted you but I feel bad for not explaining why.

One of my memories: Being pulled into a side office and grilled for a half hour for posting a similarly harmless statement to HN.

So your comment triggered mild PTSD.

It's not your place as an individual employee to post about your employer. You work in a team setting. If the team decides it's appropriate to post to HN, then that's fine. But you alone do not get to decide that.

Re: I Want to Fix Goodreads

#93

Post by munificent »

> They recommend different versions of books I’ve read. They recommend two different versions of Lord of the Rings (one of my favorite books), but I guess they don’t know these are the same book.

This is failure mode of recommendations is so common and so catastrophically useless that I do not understand how it has not been solved.

I'm into photography, so every now and then I buy a lens from Amazon. Immediately after I do, every Amazon ad banner on every website in the world switches to advertising that specific lens, for like the next month (I guess until I buy something else).

Lenses are very specific, expensive, and singular. There is almost no reason to ever have two of the same lens. The day after I buy a lens, it is practically the least likely product in the world that I will buy.

Show me anything but that. I mean, actually, don't. I like this failure mode because it makes it easy to tune out the ads. If they showed me related gear (perhaps filters that fit the lens), I might get suckered into spending more.

But, seriously, how is this not fixed?

Re: I Want to Fix Goodreads

#94

Post by taeric »

johnfn wrote: post #73
taeric wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm confused. What you describe is really just another form of popularity contest, no? Unless you have a set of reviewers that you value over others. One might call them the critical reviewers. (No, I'm not trying to be subtle) So, what books did you find? Why not make a post on your method?

Not exactly. Goodreads will value a million people giving a book 1 star higher than 20k giving it 5 stars. I just sorted by average score. I posted the books in this thread (sorry, on mobile right now).

But that is still a popularity contest, of sorts. In general, any ranking system is a popularity system. Which is logical, as there is no objective ranking of books. That is, it isn't an ordered set.

That said, I can see value in providing a score not just in the items, but on the ranking system used. Could even be adaptive based on genre. (Indeed, I would love a system to see if any books have factual errors and such. But, that is just trying to reinvent the citation systems of academia.)

And understood on the mobile. Same boat for me.

Re: I Want to Fix Goodreads

#95

Post by macobo »

SECProto wrote: post #56
anonreader123 wrote: post #18

I am a Goodreads employee. this is a burner account. i could be fired for posting. we love Goodreads and we know it is bad today. we are working to fix it. there are very few of us. we are trying. we are making big changes soon.

Can we have half stars or quarter stars? I read a lot of books, and choosing full-star 1 to 5 makes the ratings pretty useless for people who read a lot. My internal rankings are: 1 hated it/was offended/didn't finish 2 disliked it/likely didn't finish 3 finished but it was a struggle 4 finished/enjoyed/had some issues 5 finished fast/really enjoyed/may or may not have still had issues. If I look back at the 30 to 50…

Why take 60% of the rating space up by negative ratings? It seems like what you really care about is degrees of goodness.

An alternative approach:

1 - I disliked it. 2 - It's OK 3 - This is good 4 - This is great 5 - This is a must-read

Re: I Want to Fix Goodreads

#96

Post by Godel_unicode »

watwut wrote: post #69
WrtCdEvrydy wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Discovery engines are pretty easy if you just use clustering unless you allow transitivity (book in two clusters can be used to suggest a book in either cluster)

If it is so easy, why most of them sucks?

Because it's only actually easy of you remove the irremovable thing that makes it hard. This is one of those tropes that honestly really hurts the credibility of ML in the eyes of non-practitioners. Practitioners get really excited about some 75% solution, and talk about how this thing which is bad everywhere is really easy. The average listener doesn't realize how hard that last 25% (why would they? They were just told it's easy!) and end up writing off the whole thing as snake oil.

Re: I Want to Fix Goodreads

#97

Post by immy »

darkerside wrote: post #91
anonreader123 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want to be specific but I would get fired if they saw. but we read EVERY post about us. we are being ambitious and big changes are coming. biggest challenge is there is too much to do and we have so few staff.

This is so vague that if you're not faking it, you might as well be. Sorry, but don't bother posting, even under a throwaway, if you're not going to engage.

All it does is discourage timid people from making an innovative competitor.

Re: I Want to Fix Goodreads

#99

Post by olah_1 »

mekarpeles wrote: post #43

Howdy, Mek here -- I run https://openlibrary.org over at the non-profit Internet Archive (the folks that bring you the Wayback Machine). Open Library is an free, online California Library with millions of digital books to read and borrow. It's additionally an open catalog of millions of books which you may track like goodreads. Best part? If it's not to your liking, the whole project is open source! https://github.co…

It seems like there is a strong desire to _not_ make OpenLibrary an alternative to Goodreads.

See discussions here[1] and here[2].

[1]: https://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary/issues/3103

[2]: https://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary/issues/1964

Re: I Want to Fix Goodreads

#100

Post by simias »

watwut wrote: post #87
WrtCdEvrydy wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the point... if you allow transtivity, you get discovery but your recommendations start sucking.

But my recommemdations sucks pretty much everywhere.

Spotify pretty reliably finds me one or two interesting tracks in my discover weekly. That still leaves dozens of tracks I don't particularly care for (although I generally don't actively dislike them) but I still think it's a decent result.

I guess the obvious problem is that for books the equation is different. If you get recommended 20 books and after reading them you only ended up really liking 3 of them, then you'll feel like you've wasted a lot of time reading books you don't care for. Meanwhile if you listen to 20 audio tracks in the worst case scenario you'll have wasted an hour, and you can do that in the background while you do something else.

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